Correction Appended
It began inauspiciously. On a frozen afternoon in late November, as Moscow was draped with blocklong plastic billboards, banners and flags, each proclaiming a variation on a single theme — “POBEDA PUTINA — POBEDA ROSSII!” (“A Victory for Putin Is a Victory for Russia”) — a few thousand Russians converged on the city center for a rare act of political theater. It seemed, at first, like a tableau from the last days of the U.S.S.R., those heady months when glasnost swelled the streets with protesters. A handful of dissidents stood on a flatbed truck; a jumble of loudspeakers were stacked below; the crew of foreign reporters vastly outnumbered the local press; and across the way, the secret policemen with their unseen amplifiers were drowning the protest in canned laughter and Soviet waltzes. (more…)
Mark Ames asked me to write about National-Bolsheviks’ Party and punks movement. So I am forced to take a look at my past, despite the fact that I am very much involved in the present time, because Mark.
Punks - this word means so much for a russian heart… The most reckles informal movement of the last decade - one could always pick them out in the crowd of other “hippie-rockers” by a bright irokez and a striking number of ear-rings in different places. Frightful customs were asociated with the punks, eating the products of one’s own vital activity during the initiation ceremony was the best-known one. Punk-music of the 80-s was foreboding Apocalypse, and the songs’ texts seemed to be an absolute nonsense. But whatever they were spoken about and whatever frightful rumours they were spread about, on the basis of nihilism russian punks, and first of all legendary “Grajdanskaya Oborona”, managed to create their own world and culture, deserving if not respect, study at least. The new generation of irokez bearers even don’t dream about it… In the new millennium the punk culture has noticeably given up its positions. The word punk is more and more associated with an unprincipled rabble, who’s happiness is in drinking, smoking, doping… But today we’ll meet, perhaps, the last of the punk Mohicans, the bearers of the unique underground life philosophy, which will soon become history. Besides we’ll find out if they like living in the historic motherland, surrounded by the admirers of Shlomo Artsi and Sarid Hadad…
— To me, His Butler’s Story is one of your best books. One of the reasons I was shocked when I first read it was that somehow you managed to describe what Jenny, an ordinary American of the time, was like. I read that and looked around at the rest of American literature and nobody repeated it. I always wondered what made it so hard to Americans to describe carefully what was happening. You needed to go to a Russian…